The New York photographer Mitch Epstein's pictures have a built-in double take. They are lovely to look at and at the same time pack an uncomfortable punch.

You can see the moralist at work in his new book, Work, 1973-2006, to be published next week. It presents pictures from his early days through to his most recent shots. A clue to the origins of his take on photography appears in the text, which mentions the comic or humorous vernacular postcards that he enjoyed as a student when he was studying photography. He noticed that they had a point of view, 'something that was lacking in my pictures', he observed.

Americana provided him with the material he needed for his viewpoint, notwithstanding a body of work done outside the States.

'I work in a solitary way with what's at hand at that given moment,' he told me. Epstein snaps oddball, offbeat situations, and quietly observed places and people.

Some shots reproduced here are characteristic of his ambivalent touch on the button, such as Biloxi, Mississippi, 2005 taken a month or so post-Katrina. 'I was stunned and moved by the detritus,' he said.

'It is the tree of life turned upside down. It is in a hellish state except for the fact that it was made at an astonishing point during the day when the sun was just getting close to the horizon. You can just see the coast of Mexico in the distance. The light has no memory of what has happened before and the natural occurrence renders and describes the landscape – it creates a tension between a kind of beauty and a kind of terror.'

A group of hippie-like girls in the mid-1970s are seen fondling a snake in Topanga Canyon in a manner that suggests they are playing with a new toy. He shows the folksy, homey side of the American landscape overshadowed by vast industrial smoking chimneys, and the reality of a family on holiday in Cocoa Beach 1, Florida, 1983 in which the young sunbathers seem trapped in a car-park.

His mid-1970s shot of the blue-sky family outing at Chalmette Battlefield, Louisiana, where the War of Independence against the English was virtually won, has an ironic quality, hinting that the carefree visitors don't know, or perhaps don't care, where they are standing.

But what would Americana be without colour? Epstein belonged to a generation of artists who had yet to discover colour as an art form in documentary photography, but he attended the Cooper Union Art School in New York, where William Eggleston, one of the greats in American docu-photography, encouraged him to try the medium.

'Within a month of shooting colour I wanted to do nothing else,' Epstein said. 'I was connected to the world around me.'

He turned to painters for new ideas, studied Matisse and Rothko. He was also educated by studying original black-and-white prints by Atget, Brassaï, and the contemporary Robert Frank. But at the same time he writes he was 'at war with the obvious – colour had been laid on to most pictures like frosting on cake. '

He told me, 'For me, colour is organic to my way of seeing. It is an element that can be used to effect, whether emotive, or tonal, or psychological or aesthetic.'

Epstein, now recognised as one of America's leading colourists with a camera, is sought after by arts institutions, curators and collectors. A large-scale print of an American football game – one of the shots in Work – 70 x 94 in an edition of four, was on sale at his NY gallery Sikkema Jenkins at the Frieze Art Fair this autumn for $28,000.

Epstein has led a varied life. He got married in India on an elephant to the award-winning film director Mira Nair, now his ex-spouse.

During their marriage, he became producer, cinematographer, production designer and sometimes all of these at once. The late 1990s found him in Vietnam, where he produced many affectionate but revealing insights into that country, including Lotus Pond, Ha Son Binh Province, 1993.

The photograph calls to mind his comment that it has taken a long time in his working life to work out how to give room to beauty without using cliches.

Of all the pictures in Work, the section titled Family Business cuts closest to the bone. It is a retrospective documentation of the failure of his father Bill Epstein's estate agent business in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Mitch's home town. When Epstein left home for New York at the age of 18 he felt alienated from his father and his 'autocratic silences'.

When he returned home in 1999 it was more in the mode of the prodigal son. The business was in liquidation following a lawsuit after a disastrous fire incident. Epstein photographed family members, the employees, the tenants. He disinterred memorabilia such as the stars and stripes flag, a symbol of his father's patriotism.

The flag was still in its cellophane wrapping from the dry-cleaners. 'That picture has taken on a very different kind of redness, of nationalism, patriotic fervour post 9/11,' Epstein said.

His family debacle prompted him to speculate on the fact that his father, named the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of the Year in 1974, ended up like a character in an Arthur Miller tragedy. He remarked, 'My father and his generation of men were and still are driven to fulfil an American Dream – work hard, do well. When and how did that equation fail – for him, but also for a whole country of American dreamers?'

Yet in the pictures we can see the older Epsteins playing golf in Dad and Mom, Crestview Country Club 11, 2000, so perhaps life wasn't quite so tough.

What next for Epstein? The final chapter of Work deals with a task in progress. He is involved in a project to do with portraying American power, the buildings, the industrial muscle of the States, and its implications. He writes that he would like to 'describe something happening to the landscape… something environmentally off-kilter.'

Epstein's zeal has been sharpened by what he perceives as the curbed freedom that exists in his own country, both for the people and for photographers such as himself.

He has had innocent pictures confiscated by the police. Such events have re-inforced his impulse 'to make pictures to show us who we are. If we want to know ourselves we have only to look around us.'

He told me, 'the stronger half of me feels insistently that there are extraordinary things about our society and that we need to celebrate those aspects. Through the work that I'm doing, and being here, I can work at what I deeply believe in.' It is worth mentioning that it is his own power that he has learnt to respect.

'It's the power of having an audience and the ability to engage with that audience in a way that is effectual.'